Teaching the Pig to Dance

by Fred Thompson

  This would have been in the period when “separate but equal” was accepted, and that meant the majority of black kids in our community were bused about twenty-three miles to the Mt. Pleasant community to go to school. For us kids, that was just a fact of life; we didn’t think much about it.

  That didn’t stop us from competing. Some black teenagers had a pretty good baseball team, and some of us formed a team to play them. In all the games we played against each other, there were never any issues except some good-natured ribbing. One day we were playing and we had a middle-aged black fellow serving as umpire behind home plate, calling balls and strikes. I was up to bat. By then I was a lanky six feet, three inches or so. The pitcher threw a pitch that was probably three or four inches off the ground, and the umpire called it a strike. “That ball was barely off the ground. My knees are way up here,” I yelped, pointing to my knees as if he couldn’t see them.

  Quick as a wink, he replied, “I can’t help it, buddy, I didn’t make you.” I don’t recall if I got a hit, but I laughed off and on for a couple of innings. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad, who naturally thought it was as funny as I did.

  I could sense things changing, though in other ways. In high school during one summer, I worked for the “city” cutting grass along the highway with a “sling blade.” (I wondered why every little incorporated community in Tennessee called itself a “city” no matter how small the population. I guess “city police department” sounded better than “wide spot in the road police department.” But I digress.) One of my fellow members on the city “chain gang” was a black boy named Bobby, who was about my age. He was a nice enough guy, but he acted like something was on his mind all the time. He seemed studious and serious about his work, and I had assumed that he would be happy-go-lucky like I was. His demeanor registered with me, and I’d started to piece it all together.

  The evolution in a lot of people’s thinking got a big assist from an unlikely source. Segregation was about to collide with another Southern institution: football. In this battle, segregation didn’t stand a chance. Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of Alabama, saw it coming and welcomed it. Alabama had won national championships in 1961, 1964, and 1965 with all-white teams, and of course that’s the way people wanted it—in fact, they insisted upon it. However, the Alabama teams began to falter after that. In 1970, Bryant put Southern California, an integrated team, on the schedule to play in Birmingham. A black Southern Cal running back, Clarence Davis, who was originally from Birmingham, along with another black running back named Sam Cunningham, ran roughshod over Alabama and beat them 42–21. Cunningham scored three touchdowns. Pretty soon, Bryant was allowed to recruit black players for Alabama (and started winning again). Bryant said, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in one afternoon than Martin Luther King had in years.”

  “The Bear” might be forgiven for his overstatement, but in one way or another over the next several years, whether due to self-interest, habit, or law, people began to think differently about what was right and fair.

  Though good people can sometimes have a large blind spot in their value system, it was hard for the folks I knew to be mean and unkind when they literally had to come face-to-face with the result of some long-held beliefs and assumptions. We didn’t realize that a social transition was going on, even though we were living right in the middle of it. I guess that is especially true if you are busy just growing up and think you have your own serious problems to worry about. My generation saw the complete changing of certain basic notions. I went from a time when almost everyone I knew thought that separation of the races was the natural order of things to a time when almost everyone I knew thought exactly the opposite. That’s quite a journey. And it’s one that thankfully my home folks and I, along with a lot of other Americans, made together.

  During grade school there was no organized football in Lawrenceburg, so we would just take our game of disorganized mayhem to the backyards and playgrounds on our side of town—tackle football with no pads. It was mainly a lot of grabbing, shoving, and running headlong into one another, sort of like a session of the Italian Parliament.

  Lawrenceburg Public did have a basketball team. As much as I would have loved to, I knew better than to try out for the team. They didn’t need a slow-footed kid of average height and marginal shooting ability. However, I did have one basketball-related thrill in grade school. It lasted all of about thirty seconds. My class was in the basement classroom of Miss Sadie, our music teacher. Miss Sadie’s job was to teach music without the benefit of musical instruments, except for her piano, to mostly farm kids and other uninterested captives. My own musical exposure extended to listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio on Saturday nights with Dad. When I was younger, my folks had taken me to the Opry to see Hank Williams, Sr., sing Dad’s favorite, “Lovesick Blues,” and I still remember the lyrics. Unfortunately, never once in the ensuing years was “Lovesick Blues” or the Cleveland Indians’ lineup ever the answer to any exam question.

  In class we did a lot of “singing” to Miss Sadie’s accompaniment, learning about what a “sharp” and “flat” look like in a songbook, along with something about “beats to a measure.” What that has to do with music we hadn’t a clue (and I still don’t).

  For some reason, most days Miss Sadie didn’t seem to be very happy. Let’s just say that Miss Sadie’s personality reflected her lot in life. In addition to apparently not liking kids, Miss Sadie had this weird hangup about Santa Claus. She insisted that his name should be pronounced as if it were “Santy” Claus. So when we sang “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” she would stop the music and it would be “No, no, I told you it’s ‘Santy’ Claus. Santy, Santy. Okay, once again.”

  Of course, most of us aspiring musicians sang even louder, “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

  “No, no, no,” she’d say, and we’d start all over again.

  We had heard that, as a younger woman, she was very pleasant and perfectly sane. We couldn’t figure out what had happened to her.

  Anyway, basketball practice was at the same time as Miss Sadie’s class, and kids on the team were excused from class. We boys knew that Coach Webb had been watching us play basketball at recess. My buddy, Bob, was a good shooter and probably should have been on the basketball team from the beginning. One day after he had sunk a couple of long ones at recess, a kid knocked on Miss Sadie’s classroom door, came in, and announced that Mr. Webb wanted Bob to report to him at the gym. We knew that Bob had been summoned for the basketball team.

  I saw Bob’s ascendancy with decidedly mixed emotions. Well, actually, I was bitterly disappointed. Bob, and not I, had been rescued from musical purgatory for the glory and adulation that came with being an LPS Basketball Cherokee. Deep down, I knew it was never meant to be. However, a few minutes later my envy turned to total exhilaration. Bob knocked on the door and said that he needed me to come with him. I jumped up. I and everyone else knew that Mr. Webb was calling for me, too. At least, we thought we knew. As soon as we got out the door, Bob said, “Freddie, I need to borrow your gym shoes. I didn’t bring any today.” I told him where I put them in the cloakroom and slunk back into Miss Sadie’s classroom just as they were singing another verse of “Go Tell Aunt Rhody (That the Old Gray Goose Is Dead).” The song seemed appropriate. I sat there in disgrace, knowing that my athletic career was over before it began.

  Nevertheless, I was determined to “keep in shape.” For what purpose I did not know. But after church on summer nights, at my request Dad would let me out of the car and I would run home trailing the car, as Dad kept a slow pace. I suppose the neighbors wondered, “What has that Thompson boy done now to deserve this?” Actually, I was doing more than keeping in shape—I wanted to change my body from the sort of pear shape that it was in.

  The rites of passage are not easy for a kid who is on the outer edges of the talent pool. More to the point, you have to take a certain amount of abuse. For example, in our pickup footba
ll games, when you reached a certain level you got to “center for both sides” because nobody wanted to play center. They wanted to pass, run, or catch the ball. You don’t do any of that when you play center. In fact, when you centered the ball, while you still had your head between your legs, the boy on the other side would pull you forward into the ground while everyone would run over you. Soon you got smart enough to invoke the “no-ducking rule” before the game started. The rule was consistently breached, but it allowed you to retain the moral high ground in the argument that invariably ensued. It made you feel better about your bloody nose or whatever.

  The older boys invented other imaginative miseries that would be seasonably appropriate. During basketball season they came up with a game euphemistically called “Bump.” We would take turns shooting from a specific spot. If you missed a shot, you had to bend over under the goal with your hands on your knees while the others, from a running start, took turns throwing the basketball at your backside as hard as they could. Considering my shooting ability and the size of the target that I presented, it made for some long afternoons for me.

  But to me I was becoming a “player” both figuratively and literally. One might ask, Why in the world would a kid subject himself to such treatment? It reminds me of the story of the fellow at the circus who would walk around behind the elephants with a pooper-scooper and clean up after them. When asked why in the world he did not quit such a terrible job, his reply was “What, and leave show business?”

  In Nashville my eighth-grade class had a softball team, but I didn’t go out for it. I tried to pretend I wasn’t interested, but the team seemed pretty well set when I got there and I didn’t see much chance of breaking into the lineup. This way they couldn’t say I didn’t make the team.

  But that year something remarkable started to happen. I began to grow. And grow. I went from slightly above-average height to well over six feet tall. I’d also lost any signs of my little-boy chubbiness. I began my freshman year and could have sworn that a girl smiled at me for no apparent reason. I started to look into the mirror on a regular basis and finally had to face it. I was a hoss. A stud. It was happening. Never mind that that year’s annual picture showed a gangly, slightly goofy-looking kid with a bad haircut. As everyone knows, photographs can be deceiving. I was getting feedback, man. I started doubling down on a rusty old barbell that Dad had come up with from somewhere.

  Still, progress was slow. My freshman year, I got nowhere in basketball and worked my way up to second-string center in football. Yes, still playing center. My superiors, the coaches this time, were apparently still looking for someone who was willing to play a good part of the game with his head between his legs. Ducking the center had just been replaced by a steady diet of forearm blows to the top of my helmet, and occasionally my face, by the fellow opposite me. Of course, this is practice I am talking about. I was never put into a game.

  Midway through my sophomore year, it all began to change. I had grown to six feet, five inches and was developing a little coordination. I was working hard. I had the advantage of not being distracted by less important considerations, such as schoolwork. That was going to take care of itself, I thought. I’d heard a talk one day in class about “osmosis,” which really stuck with me. I was counting on it getting me through school. But back to the important stuff.

  I was one of only two sophomores to make the varsity basketball team. Actually, sightings of me on a basketball court during a game were rare that year, but riding that school bus to all those little country towns to away games was exciting enough for me for the time being. Sitting on the bench gave me a chance to get used to the crowd pressure in some of those gymnasiums. And I’m not just talking about the decibel level. In some of those old country gyms, the sideline was about one foot from the beginning of the bleachers. In order to inbound a ball, you’d have to fix your feet in among the spectators and not be distracted by an occasional pinch or the pulling of the hair on your leg as you were trying to get the ball in bounds. Of course, our home crowd presented its own challenges. I learned one night that you don’t actually have to be in the game in order to get embarrassed. We were leading by a comfortable margin when a bunch of the students started chanting, “We want Freddie, we want Freddie.” I sat on the bench, grinning, trying to adopt an aw-shucks attitude.

  As they persisted, Coach Staggs finally called me over from the other end of the bench. I threw off my warm-up jacket and ran to him. He looked at me straight in the face and said, “Do you hear what they’re yelling—that they want you?” “Yes, sir,” I replied. With that he pointed to the crowd and said, “All right, go on over there with them,” and laughed. As the crowd howled, I sheepishly walked back down to the end of the bench and tried to act like I was in on the joke. All I could do was smile and think, “Okay, that’s one for you guys.” However, it did teach me something about cool. If you want something really badly, try not to show it. Otherwise, you’re going to get messed with.

  The next year it all came together. I had filled out to about 185 pounds of dangerous muscle. However, I had to be doubly impressive in order to overcome an obstacle to my success—my mouth—and a penchant to find humor where others less clever failed to see it.

  My first day of summer practice I couldn’t find my gym socks and showed up for practice in my high-top shoes with no socks, looking even more like a backwoods Ichabod Crane. Then our coach gave us a somewhat emotional speech, which I thought was funny since it was only a prelude to running us until our tongues hung out. During warm-ups I yelled for the boys to bear down. “Let’s get serious, guys,” I said. “After all, we’ve got a game in six months.” A verbal lashing ensued, and after that for some reason the coaching staff thought my attitude wasn’t exactly what it should be. Of course, my attitude toward football was just fine. I just didn’t see what that had to do with passing up a good line.

  They say that if a kid doesn’t think his high school coach hung the moon, then there is something wrong with either the boy or the coach. I felt that way about Coach Staggs. He was looked upon with fear and awe because of his exalted position in our eyes and because of his demeanor, which was sort of like Captain Ahab without the humor. He was simply the gatekeeper to the most important thing in our lives at the time, and he commanded respect. No one doubted the story about the player who was out behind the ag building one day when Coach was seen approaching. He ate the cigarette he had been smoking.

  The funny thing about it was that Coach was about five feet, six inches tall. Behind his back (and I mean way behind his back) some of the seniors called him Stumpy. A creative player from years gone by had come up with this one: “Do you know why Stumpy sued the city? Answer: Because they built the sidewalk too close to his butt.” From a rough childhood he had become a high school phenom as a running back from the mean streets of Nashville. He went on to Ole Miss on a football scholarship. He was Red Grange, as far as I was concerned. He didn’t like smart alecks, comics, or individualists. You can see what I was up against. He had strict rules on and off the field. For example, there would be no water on the football field during a game or during practice, and we had plenty of ninety-plus-degree days under a Tennessee sun.

  These and other things that today would have the coach up before the United Nations on charges of human rights violations were not uncommon back in the day. It’s amazing how kids nowadays seem to be able to play almost as well as we did while still getting a drink of water.

  I found that the coaches would overlook a certain number of indiscretions if you knocked enough people on their butt. Another wonderful lesson I was learning. While I was not very fast, I discovered that by employing a rather sophisticated technique I could make up for it. They tried me at defensive end and discovered that from a standing upright start I could crash the opposing backfield to great effect. I would run headlong into a group of blockers and disrupt whatever they were trying to do. I didn’t even have to make the tackle. My teammates could mop
that up. Pretty sophisticated, huh? I’ve seen athletes on TV thank the Lord for their “God-given talent.” Well, this was my God-given talent. Occasionally, I could even grab the runner on the way by.

  As a junior, my newly discovered skill earned me a starting position on the defensive line. I felt that I had died and gone to heaven. And I wasn’t going to let little things distract me—little things like permanent disfigurement.

  This particular distraction came in the form of my old nemesis, Joe Plunkett. Every boy seems to have one growing up, and Joe was mine. Hopefully, most boys are smart enough not to have a nemesis who started shaving at age twelve. Joe was a senior, and he was still tough. We’d had at least three major encounters over the years. By encounters I mean fights where blood was shed—usually mine.

  Anyway, beyond having my starting defensive-line job, I had the added responsibility of centering for punts and extra points for the team. Joe was the punter. One day on the practice field we got into an argument about something. Naturally, as any fool would do, I pulled off my helmet equipped with face mask. As I went for his legs, Joe adroitly grabbed the back of my shoulder pads and pulled me forward and down onto the ground, causing my face to plow up enough turf to plant a nice row of beans.

  However, all I actually planted was two of my front teeth—one tooth and about a third of another, to be precise. The thing I most vividly remember about this episode is how utterly narrow-minded a boy’s mother can be about such situations. It seems to take a mother to point out that, even though you may be acting like a six-year-old, teeth don’t grow back when you are a teenager. Mom was heartbroken. She probably also felt that I didn’t need any additional disadvantages as far as my personal appearance was concerned.